Semantic Web News & Articles

Over the years, the Drupal (news, site) web content management system has had the same problem as any other growing software project: deciding which features are important enough to belong in the core of the software.

One such candidate feature -- which the Drupal team has discussed since 2004 -- is that of enabling CMS administrators to define custom content types, or fields for the system.

The Content Construction Kit (CCK), an add-on module for Drupal, has handily taken care of this need for years. In Drupal 7, it will no longer be needed. But even more, we'll be getting some tasty semantic web features as part of the changes.

With the planned Fall 2009 release of a feature-rich up-grade to its Text Mining Engine (TME), Nstein Technologies (news, site) is taking semantic metadata firmly into the world of Web 3.0.

For anyone that is not aware already, Nstein is a global specialist provider of solutions in the online media and web publishing world. TME 5.0, the company says, will include enhancements to linguistic abilities, Web 3.0 compliance and a number of new tools that will give users greater control over semantic metadata.

As we've discussed before, the semantic web is supposed to help with issues where computers just have no idea of what they're seeing in any context. The problem was getting people to take advantage of this technology in any real numbers.

Well, if you care about Search Engine Optimization (and who doesn't?) then it's time to wake up and smell the semantics. Otherwise, your search results will plummet as SEO gold goes to those who take advantage of Google's new tool: the Rich Snippet.

And Dries Buytaert of Drupal (news, site) seems to agree completely.

A new set of semantic tools that enables users to track, monitor and manage content on websites has just been unveiled by UK-based website quality monitoring solutions provider Magus.

Particularly useful for companies concerned about compliance monitoring, ActiveStandards Aboutness Reports (ASAR) gives enterprises, especially those with multiple sites, a significantly enhanced view of website content.

While there are many Enterprise Content Management Systems that include a ‘birds-eye’ view of content, Magus’s new tool – powered by the Thomson Reuters OpenCalais service – can tell if your content is up-to-date, on-topic, on-brand and search optimized.

As an added attraction it comes as a SaaS.

The World Wide Web Consortium's OWL (Web Ontology Language) Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of the "OWL 2 Web Ontology Language Document Overview." Go ahead. Grab a dictionary. We'll wait.

This document is the first in an exciting thirteen volume escapade through the syntaxes, sub-languages, along with other details behind OWL 2 and its differences from OWL 1.

A Montreal-based software and research development company has developed a markup solution and language-neutral asset-descriptor that when fully developed, could result in a universal computer language for representing information in databases, web and document contents and business objects.

While still at a seminal stage of development, the company Gnoesis, aims to address the problem of data fragmentation caused by semantic differences between developers and users from different linguistic backgrounds.

The Interactive Knowledge Stack (IKS) project is relatively new, formed in January 2009 in part with funding from the European Commission. Its goal is to provide an open source technology stack for adding semantic web enhancements to existing open source content management systems.

There are many ways the IKS can enhance existing content management system implementations for this purpose, from the user interface down to the guts of the database layer. The IKS is currently seeking developers, integrators, vendors, end users, consultants and others in the open source community who are involved with related projects.

The mission: to build a specification, design, and then implement the IKS. To this end, a requirements workshop for open source developers has been scheduled in Salzburg for May 27 through 29, though it may move to Munich in June if there is enough interest. The purpose of the workshop is to present the technical vision of the IKS, offer your critical assessments and discuss participation details.

For more information about the IKS Project, see the IKS Project site.

In the march toward creating the semantic web, web content management systems such as Drupal (news, site) and many proprietary vendors struggle with the goal of emitting structured information that other sites and tools can usefully consume. There's a balance to be struck between human and machine utility, not to mention simplicity of instrumentation.

With RDFa (see W3C proposal),  software and web developers have the specification they need to know how to structure data in order to lend meaning both to machines and to humans, all in a single file. And from what we've seen recently, the Drupal community is making the best of it.

Stanford University is working on developing a new enterprise 2.0 e-mail system based on semantics. Traditional e-mail centers need specific e-mail addresses, group lists, or the like. But SEAmail (Semantic E-mail Addressing) seeks to eliminate this need by pulling e-mail addresses from large databases based on search criteria and a semantic understanding of those criteria in comparison with the databases.

The web, much like our global environment, is in a state of flux. The transition to what is being called the semantic web (or web 3.0) is happening and it’s happening while you read this. Therefore it is critical for businesses to understand the transition to enable them to plan appropriately for the future.

With an understanding of how crucial it is for businesses to have access to and understand the changes happening on the web right now, Dow Jones brings you a three part free webinar series called “Discovering the Semantic Web” starting on Thursday, February 12, 2009. The webinar is scheduled for an hour.

We’ve talked a lot about the benefits of semantics in the recent past with regard to search functionality, but you’re probably wondering if there’s anything else to be gleaned from linguistic development.

Straight up: you want to know if semantics, in any way shape or form, mean money. The answer, friends, is "yes." BooRah, a restaurant reputation report, is a prime example of this.

Semantic search, semantic Web… As of late, we’ve noticed the spiking interest in this branch of linguistics as it applies to the good ole Web.

What’s next — semantic blogging? Nah, not just yet. For now, the industry is moving to standardize some of the semantics and logistics of the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language.

The semantic web grows ever nearer. Soon everything we think will be organized, categorized and analyzed by Google.

Speaking of which, Google will begin to officially release Google Suggest in the next week. Google Suggest is exactly what it sounds like — a tool that works to better understand you, as a user and what you search for. Often, due to misspellings and other limitations of our human brains, our searches can bring up results that don’t exactly match what we want. Google Suggest aims to help users better formulate queries, reduce spelling errors and save keystrokes.

Expert System is an Italian company that is beginning to lay down a footprint in the ‘States. The company has released two semantic Web products in the U.S., COGITO Monitor and COGITO Focus, so we thought we’d spread the word.

COGITO Monitor is a semantic-based analyzer of consumer opinions and sentiment from online forums and blogs. It crawls the Web , measuring and graphing ‘customers’ feedback about your companies’ products and services – from millions of web pages and blogs’. And then reports back and tells you exactly what people are saying about your service. Semantic technology is pretty much essential for this kind of reporting, as it can get into the forum-esque nooks and crannies which Google-type crawlers cannot.

COGITO Focus meanwhile is a semantic indexing, search and analysis tool that manages strategic internal (intranet etc.) and external information.
‘More than 80% of the information useful for business is trapped in texts of various types (e.g. web sites, blogs, news feeds, emails, databases, etc.) ‘, and they’re spread throughout both internal and external repositories. Focus aims to grab all that material and get it to the decision makers in an effective, automated manner.

Gil Jenkins, who looks after Expert System’s PR, also pointed us to a cool content categorization utility that the company builds, but we’re not sure if it’s on the market just yet (in the U.S. at least). Content Categorizer automatically classifies documents and is provided with linguistic intelligence … take a closer look for yourself.

Visit the Expert System homepage for more.

When we talk about the Semantic Web we mean more meta-information hidden in the page code, but derived from the content itself, with the aim of letting Web services and search engines know exactly what’s there without having to guess from keywords and tags. XML is one format which can structure content to contain more classification material. RDF is the preferred data model used, which splits content into entities and relationships, and the RDF model most usually utilizes XML to structure content.